Biography
Craig Brandon is an award-winning author of six books of popular history and public affairs. He is also editor and publisher of Surry Cottage Books, a micropublishing company in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire. His newest book, to be published by BenBella Books in July 2010, is The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up On Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It. It's a warning to parents about the binge drinking, grade inflation, dumbed-down classes and anti-intellectualism that passes for learning in the lower regions of American higher education.
Craig spent 20 years as an education reporter, general assignment reporter, columnist and editor at newspapers in Upstate New York. His writing and reporting won awards from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Associated Press, the National School Boards Association, the New York State United Teachers, the Gannett Foundation and Heast newspapers. He also won first prize in investigative reporting from the Education Writers Association.
He later was appointed Director of Communications for the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, NY, the public affairs research arm of the State University of New York.
He has served as an expert and technical advisor for a segment of the "Unsolved Mysteries" television program and has appeared a number of times on the History Channel, the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. He served as an on-camera expert for "The Day They Died" on the History Channel.
Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited, his 1986 book, now in its 15th printing, was selected for the community pro-literacy reading project called "Amsterdam Reads" in 2009.
The Electric Chair: An Unnatural American History, Craig's 1999 book has been republished in paperback by McFarland and Co. in 2009.
From 1995 to 2007 he was involved with student media at Keene State College in New Hampshire, where he advised the student newspaper and taught classes in reporting, news writing and editing.
Craig has a number of interesting lectures / slide shows that he has presented at hundreds of colleges, historical societies, libraries etc. His topics are Mount Monadnock, the Chester Gillette murder case of 1906, the history of the electric chair and micropublishing. For more information, contact him at the e-mail address below.
On June 29, 2003 he was married to Jean Winter, who teaches French and Spanish at Keene Middle School. They live in a little house called Surry Cottage, halfway up a hillside in Surry, New Hampshire.
He is currently assisting with three documentary films. The first, which is being directed by Derek Taylor of Southern Connecticut University, is about the Gillette case. Another, the first documetary about Mount Monadnock, is being produced by Rabbit Ear Productions of Keene. Finally he is helping with a new documentary about the electric chair. Also in the works is a new book about the Gillette case to be called "The Murder that Will Never Die," and a book about rum runners of the 1920s.
updated October, 2009
Craig Brandon
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